Fic: Takes Hostages [The Social Network][2/2]

[antistar_e]

<-- part one

+

In the end, it only takes about three hours and a single suitcase to pack up Mark's entire life and move him out, and most of that was spent arguing with his brother over whose copy of 1984 was propping up the coffee table.

He feels like there should have been a little more pomp and circumstance, or something -- like maybe it should have been a little bit more difficult to, like, completely pull every sign that Mark Zuckerberg ever existed right out of their home. He feels strangely erased, once he hears the door click shut behind his back, muffling the so long, sucker!s and the goodbye, Marks and the I claim his bunk, I claim his bunk!s.

Two floors down, he leans against the railing on the landing outside the Albrights' apartment and listens to Erica's mom make her double-check that she has everything -- train ticket and driver's license and toiletries and asthma medication, underwear and socks and her favorite novels. Not for the first time, either, if the way Erica's grumbling increases in volume is any indication.

There's an oblong mirror lofted up high in the corner, presumably so that people don't round that corner blind while carrying heavy objects. Mark drifts over to it, tilting his head back and studying himself.

Here's a small man, with not much to him, and he knows that for a fact rather than by observation, because that mirror will make anybody look diminutive. He has an unsmiling face, a low, heavy brow like a Neanderthal, and eyes with no color to them. His clothes are soft-looking and shapeless; Mark has never bothered with anything fashionable in his life, because all his clothes will pass down to his siblings one way or another and they need to be versatile. Mark has mastered the art of taking up as little space as possible, as less food and sleep and money as he can.

The floor creaks behind him. Erica touches his back, her hand warm through the cotton of his shirt.

She's wearing a cardigan the same soft purple of lilacs, patched at the elbows where the fabric has worn away to white, an underneath it, a summer dress. She's in cabled grey tights and heavy construction boots that used to be her mom's; Mark remembers Ms. Albright sometimes had to bring them to a site with her on the weekends -- they had felt like superheroes with the big yellow hats and the clobbering boots.

Besides their height and slender build, they don't look much alike, he realizes as her studies their reflections together. Her face is sweet and round, and she escaped inheriting the family hair; hers spills gossily down to the small of her back, and only starts curling up in high humidity. He watches as she pushes a lock of it behind her ear, catching it there with a crosshatch of bobby pins.

"Let's go, before she makes me run the gauntlet one more time," she mutters out of the corner of her mouth, and Mark smirks.

+

On the train, Erica makes small talk with the woman sitting across from them, while Mark drowses, cheek pillowed precariously on the ball of her shoulder and rocking with the motion of the train.

Erica mentions that it's move-in day for the greater Boston area schools, which has to be pretty hard to miss, because Mark and Erica aren't the only two on the train with their entire lives packed away into suitcases, boxes, and bags, wearing university sweatshirts that haven't been washed into shape yet. The woman tinkles out a good-natured laugh and says, "Where did you say you were going? I always heard that it was bad luck for couples to attend the same college."

Mark's eyes flare open, and then he thins them at her.

"We're cousins," he bites, before Erica can say anything, and chagrin flinches across the woman's face. "Family stays with family, that's what family does."

"It'll be nice," says Erica placidly. "Knowing someone in the same city. Won't be so lonely."

+

In Boston, nobody knows who they are.

Nobody looks at them and thinks they should have just been born twins, not here; nobody here knows that once, Mark and Erica competed to see who could swing the highest on the playground -- they fell when the chains themselves came off the frame, fracturing their arms in the exact same place.

Nobody here knows that, growing up, one of Mark's favorite things was the view outside his parents' bedroom window: it overlooked the parking lot and the back of the next apartment building, but at night, when all the windows were dark and the only light came from the street lamp, the cars lined up in the lot looked like the malicious grin of some gaping mouth; filled with crooked, gleaming teeth. Nobody here knows that Erica used to tell the boys who were bigger than her that her big brother was going to beat them up, back before she figured out that Mark was never going to be bigger than any of the boys.

It's lonely at first, of course it is, because they go to different schools.

There's nothing quite as intimidating as being as freshman, standing in a new quad watching everybody else greet people they already know, and realizing you don't know a single soul. Erica won't be in any of his classes, she won't be holding down a table at lunch, she won't catch the bus home with him on the days she doesn't have play practice, and Mark's never really bothered to learn how to socialize.

And then he gets over it, because there's nothing else to be done.

Five minutes into his eight AM class, his phone vibrates with a text, loud enough to startle the drooping girl in the seat next to him; she sits up abruptly, scrubbing at her face.

I may have just verbally eviscerated this creepy guy who's been lingering around the girl's bathroom. Is this what it's like to be you all the time?

Mark grins. you have learned well, young padawan, he texts back.

At the end of class, it earns them all a dry remark from the professor about how they're not fooling anyone, he can tell when students are using their phones, because there's no other reason they would smile like that at their crotches; what an astounding example of deductive Harvard skills, Mark thinks, and shoulders his backpack and joins the stream of people filtering into the hallway. He has ten minutes and he's pretty sure his next class is across campus.

+

Three weeks into the start of term, Mark meets Dustin when Dustin tows his roommate Billy down the dorm hallway on a skateboard that Billy clearly doesn't know how to balance on. Mark's coming back from brushing his teeth in the bathroom at the end of the hall and stops, amused, to watch Dustin pound on every doorway and announce that an intensely badass game of Apples to Apples is starting in 3J in five minutes.

"Come on, bro!" says Billy, adopting some unidentifiable accent that's probably supposed to sound like Bob Marley. He gestures to Mark. "Hop on."

So Mark shoves his (still wet) toothbrush into the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt and does exactly that, because he and Billy are so slight that they can both fit, and Dustin only hollers good-naturedly before putting his back into steering them down the hall.

He winds up getting along with them because they have the exact opposite problem he does; they have no idea when to stop socializing. Dustin doesn't require any input during a conversation in order to keep producing output, and Billy grins and chews so much Big Red that Mark wonders if, when they cut him open on an autopsy table, they'll find petrified clumps of swallowed gum obstructing his intestines, and the day after the Apples to Apples game, they slam their trays down next to Mark at the cafeteria where Mark is trying to finish eating as soon as possible, and continue on conversing with him like there was never a break.

Grade school politics, Mark thinks, and doesn't bother moving seats. He was here first.

With Dustin comes Chris, a journalism student who hands Mark's ass to him during a discussion about the merits of investigative reporting; literally deconstructs his argument on the spot, and even for a moment looks like he's about to hand Mark a works-cited to go with it.

He's also probably gay, which is interesting because Mark hasn't actually met a gay person before -- it just wasn't anything anybody mentioned by name in his hometown, and he never socialized to the point where that would be something he learned about someone, so the broad spectrum of sexuality always seemed like it was just something that happened somewhere else.

With Chris comes Eduardo, and for the first time in Mark's life, he actually has a group of people he wants to impress, wants to see when they don't have somewhere else to be, wants to laugh with and make laugh.

Somewhere along the line, Erica informs him that most people call that friendship.

+

Mark's roommate freshman year sort of hates his guts, which, whatever, the dude's an only child and his mom's spearheading some trans-Alaskan oil pipeline and is getting filthy rich doing it, and he all but grew up on a private yacht in a harbor in Connecticut. It's not like they ever had a prayer of getting along.

He and Erica alternate crashing at each other's dorms during the weekends, and when it's her turn to come up to Cambridge, he takes perverse pleasure in hanging a sock on the door for as long as obnoxiously possible, the entire time they're sitting there with take-away from the caf and things to make fun of on the Internet.

"Has he ever actually done anything to you to deserve this?" she asks him, tone wry, after the third time he does it.

"I can't be held responsible for other people's unfortunate decision to exist and be the way they are," Mark deadpans back at her, and changes the subject. "How's the inferior college going?"

She rolls her eyes.

Dustin and Billy invite him out to this burger place they've just discovered one weekend ("and they have these hot dog and beef burgers and they make them with Hebrew National, kill me now, it's so good,") and it doesn't even occur to him that Erica might not be invited until he gets there, and their eyes all but double in size when she scoots into the booth next to Mark, tugging down the hem of her skirt and pressing her side against his to make room for Chris, who squeezes in with them.

"You know a girl," Dustin goes blankly, and jumps a little in his seat, like Chris had just kicked him under the table.

"With the shock, really?" Mark mutters. "It's not that difficult to believe."

Eduardo recovers first, and leans around their water glasses to give Erica his friendly businessman grin. "Hi," he goes. "You are ...?"

"Erica," she answers, and smiles at the chorus of hi, Ericas that follow. "Mark and I have known each other literally since we were born."

"She's three weeks older than I am."

"I abuse it constantly," Erica agrees.

Unsurprisingly, it's one of the better nights of Mark's first semester at Harvard, having Erica and his friends together in one place. It works for them, too, of course, because Mark's so much easier to handle when Erica is there to translate.

"You just have to learn how to hold more than one conversation at the same time," she tells them laughingly. "Like changing settings on a Stairmaster. It's exhausting, but after nineteen years, you get a taste for anticipating it."

He'll think back on it later, and realize that no, at no point that night did he ever mention that she's his cousin, that their mothers are each other's sisters, that Randy White maliciously tried to get the yearbook staff to vote them "most likely to move to Arkansas and have fourteen kids." It wasn't intentional, it just ... wasn't relevant, so they didn't bring it up, which is why, at a party that the RAs sigh at and pretend that they don't know everything is copiously spiked with Absolut, he double-takes in surprise when Dustin choruses, "go on, Mark, don't be shy, kiss the girl!" after Mark pulls the kiss another member of your party block out of the College Edition Jenga tower.

Erica beats him to it; she plants her hands on Mark's shoulders to pin him back against his chair and her spine curves into it when she presses her grin against his.

"Isn't that cheating?" Eduardo wonders at large, as everybody whoops and Mark opens his mouth with the ease of practice to slick his tongue in between her teeth, hand settling against her ribs. "I mean, they're basically dating anyway."

And at that point, Mark feels like a complete idiot for not having realized this sooner.

+

In Boston, nobody knows who they are.

Autumn becomes winter becomes spring becomes summer, and the feeling of newfound freedom never wears off, makes it easy to forget. They're drunk on it, atmospheric and sunshine bright and there's something innately, personally powerful about standing up and saying fuck it.

They moved so far away from home that they are literally new people, and they use it.

When they have sex -- either in Mark's drafty old ivy-encrusted dorm that feels kind of like being ass-naked in front of three hundred years of history or in Erica's economical housing unit that actually possesses central heating -- it's loud, it's enthusiastic, it's messy, because they can, they can, and fuck it if there are people on their floor who can hear them. After a year of careful, awkward experimentation, perpetually terrified of Erica's mother on the other side of the door or getting caught in the backstage costume room, Mark wants this.

He wants everybody to hear them, because no one's ever going to quite understand how monumentally astounding it is that they're even here at all: that when Mark does the walk of shame Monday morning, it's without any shame at all; that Erica can yank his head back to suck a hickey into his throat and he doesn't have to cover it up; that when Erica's roommate asks, she says, "Yeah, I guess I am seriously dating him," and catches his eye, head tilted and eyes soft.

"Every boy I have ever met," she mumbles against the ball of his shoulder the next weekend, their sheets a nest tangled around them, slick and warm. She smiles, letting Mark nose in to kiss her eyelids, for no other reason than they're there. "And I just wind up comparing them to you."

"I've never bothered looking anywhere else," he tells her, matter-of-fact. "That implies that there's someone better out there."

They try everything they can think of, and then they ask around for ideas for more.

"Did it ever occur to you," says Chris. "To keep that kind of shit to yourself?"

Mark just shrugs. Privacy is for people who have something to be embarrassed about.

They watch porn together like they did in high school, pointing out plot inconsistencies and continuity errors and then almost getting caught in the showers together later.

They even Google things out of the Kama Sutra, and Dustin pushes himself off the couch to come see what they're laughing at. He calls Chris and Billy and Eduardo over, and five minutes of what the fuck is that even becomes fifteen minutes of them trying to fold themselves into pretzels to see in what way is it sexy at all, and then cramping up from laughing too hard.

+

Mark learns every new thing there is to learn about Erica's body, until nothing is alien to him anymore, not the dip of her anklebone or the dusting of hair on her upper lip, not the soft fleshy inside of her lip up by her gums or the falling ladder of vertebrae in her back.

They talk about the future, sometimes. Mark officially declares a CS major at the end of his freshman year, and Erica picks up Performing Arts as a minor.

"Yeah, our career fields are really going to overlap," she goes amusedly, while he dozes in the grass in the main quad, having pulled an all-nighter trying to get CourseMatch live before registration opened for the next year.

"We'll take Billy and your roommate and start an a-cappella group," he decides, mumbling, and smiles proudly when she throws her head back to bark with laughter.

"Or, no," he says, some other time. "I know. We'll become truckers. Let's face it, it's kind of the only thing you can do with a Fine Arts degree from BU," and she rolls her cheek against his neck, finding the tender skin at the inside of his elbow and giving it a hard pinch in retaliation.

He doesn't tell her, but for an hour or two, he seriously considers it -- a Harvard degree, and he'll use it to buy themselves a big rig, some eighteen-wheeler with a chrome grill and maybe some fuzzy dice.

Everywhere they go, it'll be like Boston all over again; nobody will know who they are, or give two shits where they're going or where they're from, or what they're going to do in the dirt-cheap highway motels. Mark might go stir-crazy from the lack of stimulation on the open road, but it would be worth it, he thinks, for the anonymity.

"It'll just be the two of us," he says, propped up against the headboard with his laptop open across his thighs. She's asleep, turned into the wall, and can't hear him. "Trucking our brains out and having sex in every single state, and nobody can say shit about it."

Most likely to move to Arkansas and have fourteen kids, and for a second, Mark even thinks about that, too -- something curly-haired and dimpled, climbing into his lap as he codes just because it wants to be a part of what he's doing, something half-Erica and half-him -- and shivers full-body, pressing it away, very deep down.

+

Erica is fucking pissed when the news about FaceMash hits, and yeah, he probably should have seen that coming.

"It had nothing to do with you!" he protests, after they get the Harvard network back online and she calls him, bitchy and -- for some reason he won't be able to fathom for years -- actually genuinely hurt. "I don't know why you're so mad about it."

It'd been Billy's idea, and they were bored. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and at least it wasn't farm animals ("he says, like he's expecting praise for not being a bigger douchebag," Erica says acidly.) Eduardo came over after a party none of the rest of them got invited to; he suggested that maybe it wasn't such a good idea for them to be ranking other students, which obviously meant that Mark had to go through with it.

"It's disgusting," she says, heavily. "I shouldn't have to tell you that."

"You go to BU. You weren't even in it, and anyway, if you were, I would have rigged the game so that you won every time."

"Mark," she sighs. "I love you, but you're really fucking dumb."

"Okay," he says readily enough, because she was there the last time he said something really stupid to a girl and got punched flat for it, too. "But that's why I have you."

+

Things plateau after The Facebook becomes a thing.

They run a story in the Crimson, and another in the BU student newspaper, which Erica brings over with a joke about intercepting fanmail next. People start recognizing Mark in the halls now, and approach him in the quad like they weren't avoiding his eyes just a month or two ago, when he was caught in the center of the shitstorm that was the FaceMash fallout.

Mark is honestly just waiting for it to die down, so he can go back to minding his own business, but it doesn't.

And something has to give.

In February, they're at this swanky bar uptown, somewhere they've never been before. He's pretty sure Eduardo's off getting blown in the men's bathroom, and Mark and Erica sit at the bar together, chattering about The Facebook's progress (they only recently solved a server space problem, and in the last twenty-four hours, no new crises has sprung up, which is exciting,) and watching the bathroom door, hawk-like, because you know what would be hilarious? If someone walked in there right now.

Erica's been quiet most of the night, content to let Mark do the talking, which he has no problem with.

He pauses, though, and turns their interlocked hands over, inspecting her nails. "I'm going to tell Mom and Dad soon," he says, finally, and through the fan of his eyelashes, he sees her eyes lid like she's been dealt a blow. "About The Facebook. If we're going to expand, I'm going to need them to back us up."

She finishes the thought for him. "It'll put us under a magnifying glass."

"We're kind of under one already, aren't we?"

On the ride over, Christy had peppered them with questions -- easy, curious questions, no different from the ones Dustin and Billy and the rest asked the first time they met Erica, too, but Mark had felt acutely uncomfortable all the same. It's too close to that feeling he got, the first time he heard dirty kissing cousins -- something worried, something shameful. One of these days, someone's going to think to ask their families about them.

Erica, of course, is the one who makes the hard decision. She always has been.

Mark always told his career advisor that he would go wherever he was told there was a need for him, and adapt to it when he got there, but Erica made plans.

She pulls her hand from his and tips his chin up.

"You're going to put The Facebook on other campuses," she informs him, voice low and just for them. She leans in, pressing a kiss to his cheek. "It's going to flourish," and his ear. "It's going to be the coolest thing that ever happened at Harvard, and that includes Natalie Portman," and his temple. "And you will be stupidly famous," and his forehead. "And I ... I will be a footnote mentioned under your loving and supportive family."

He looks up at her, their noses brushing with a brief contact, and for a second, it's as if her round, sweet face takes up his entire field of vision; stars and suns and constellations all.

Her eyes are colorless, the same blue-grey of a blank canvas, and they're the same eyes he has, and their mothers have before them. They lid away from sight when she leans down, her hand fluttering to rest against Mark's pulse, bracing herself there. He kisses her back, instinctive; their mouths together are warm, and they linger with a press, like they're trying to leave a permanent imprint of each other on their own lips.

When Eduardo comes out of the bathroom ten minutes later, flushed all the way down the open collar of his shirt, Mark is sitting at the bar alone, swinging his feet above the floor.

He weaves his way in between the tables, his grin fading. "Hey," he says, coming up beside Mark. "Are you okay?"

Mark drags the very tips of his fingers along the bar's edge, and it's not hard at all to inject the heartbreak into his voice when he says, soft, "Erica broke up with me."

Eduardo's face smoothes out in surprise, going blank for a second before he drags the second stool closer and sinks into it. "I'm here for you," he says, immediate and earnest, and it's rich, coming from someone who's still breathing a little erratically, mouth all spread from somebody else.

Mark hops to his feet. "We're going to expand," he announces over his shoulder as he heads for the exit.

"Expand?" Eduardo echoes, scrambling after him and catching his elbow, pulling them off to the side. Obediently, Mark stops so that they can wait for Christy. "Do you think that's such a good idea?"

"Of course I do. Yale and Columbia, to start with."

He keeps blinking, but he catches up soon enough. "And Stanford," he says, and continues at Mark's look, "if you want this go to places, send it to the other coast. They could use something like The Facebook in Silicon Valley."

"Right," Mark goes, taking in a steadying breath.

Eduardo studies him, frowning so hard his eyebrows have knitted into a unibrow. His hand is still on Mark's arm, holding him there like an anchor, and Mark looks at it, and thinks, inanely, that he's going to need a new best friend, as if it's as simple as needing a new bike lock or another bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Eduardo says, every word measured. "You two seemed fine, and ... I mean, she's hot and you're smart, what better combination is there?"

"Classy," Mark mutters back, and Eduardo has the decency to look embarrassed. "I just want to work now, Wardo, so can we go?"

"Hey," and that's Christy; her hair and make-up have been perfectly reapplied, making her look doll-like and starkly beautiful. The only thing that gives her away is the slight hitch in her voice, that cocksucker rasp that's hard to mask. She blinks at Mark. "Is everything all right?"

"We're expanding," Eduardo tells her.

She accepts this in stride. "Excellent," she says. "What can I do to help?"

+

Christy introduces them to Sean.

As easy as it was for Mark to pack up all of his belongings and move out of his family's apartment, like he never existed, it's just as easy to pack it all up again and move himself across the country to the Bay Area of California, where the fog is bitingly cold in the mornings and nobody knows how to obey any of the fucking traffic laws.

He feels like one of those fibrous plants, the kind with the shallow root system, that come up with a simple tug.

He doesn't have much, but what he does have is this house in Palo Alto, and sleepless interns, and a rapidly-growing website that still doesn't quite feel like a company, except it is, and fuck if Mark isn't going to give everything he has to keep it.

It's not something Eduardo understands, which is how they find themselves in a hallway that smells like gym socks and a cloying overlay of Lysol, and Eduardo's face is pinched with fury, hate, exhaustion, saying, "-- just don't get it, Mark, you can't ask me to uproot my entire life and come out here."

"Why not?"

And maybe it's stupid of Mark to assume Facebook deserves the same level of dedication of all its employees that Mark himself has put into it, and maybe it's unfair of Mark to expect Eduardo to be like Erica, because nobody can replace Erica. That was their decision. But it still hurts when Eduardo runs the flats of his hands over his wet hair, changing tracks to say, "I know your family lets you get away with whatever you want, so you don't know what it's like, you don't know what kind of position I'm in --"

"I don't know what to tell you, Wardo, it's not that difficult --" "

"-- you've never really had to sacrifice anything --"

He stops, because whatever crosses Mark's face at that has to be terrifying.

For a second, he can't even say anything, throat swollen shut with the force of anger that flares white-hot through him. "Don't --" he manages, strangled, his spine ramrod straight. "You ever presume to know what I've sacrificed for Facebook."

Eduardo backtracks, shifting his weight, his throat rolling with a hard swallow. Then he squares his shoulders and says, "What did you mean, get left behind?"

+

He's napping, head pillowed on his folded arms on the tabletop, lulled by the soft whir of his laptop's processors at his elbow. Somebody bumps the chair next to him, and he sits up, inhaling sharply through his nose. They've turned all the lights down, but what little there is still hurts, and he slants his eyes against it.

One of the lawyers looks down on him, her dove-grey jacket tucked over her arm. Her wide-set eyes are kind, and Mark realizes he doesn't know her name, for all that she's been sitting two chairs down since eight this morning.

"We're done for the day," she informs him, unnecessarily.

"Oh, I'm just going to --" he waves a hand, and then pulls his laptop closer, running his fingers over the touchpad to wake it up. "Do you think anyone would mind?"

"I don't see why it would be a problem," she returns, and hefts the strap of her handbag higher onto her shoulder before she turns and walks for the door. "Have a good night, Mr. Zuckerberg."

"You too, um ..."

"Marilyn," she supplies, clearly having anticipated that. "Marilyn Delpy, I'm --" she pauses, wavering for a beat with one hand on the doorframe, before she turns back to him and says, "Tomorrow morning, Sy's going to suggest that we don't waste any more of our time with this. He wants you to settle. He -- we -- don't think this case should go to trial."

"Of course," Mark says, hunching his shoulders. One day of this deposition shit down, and he thinks it'll be years before he'll be able to get the knot out from in between his shoulder blades. "I'm not exactly the most sympathetic figure to put up in front of a jury, am I?" Her mouth makes a funny shape, something dangerously close to pity, and he snorts. "Yeah, I'm starting to see that."

"Not only that," she says, very evenly. "But watch what else. Why do we have conflicting testimonies regarding Erica Albright? Mr. Saverin swears up and down that she's your ex-girlfriend, while your sister seems pretty convinced she's your cousin who grew up in the downstairs apartment."

Mark goes still all over.

"You'll never get Erica on a witness stand," he gets out. He's gripping the edge of the table so hard his fingertips have gone numb. "She's smarter than that. She has nothing to do with Facebook, she'll tell you that."

"Doesn't matter," Marilyn shakes her head. "All someone has to do is ask the question, and suddenly everybody's wondering. Just how close were you?"

He clenches his jaw, highwire tight, and then he snaps. He spins his chair around, putting his back to the Palo Alto city lights and glaring her down. "And what?" he says grittily, voice gone as caustic as rust. "Because I'm an asshole, it'll make it that much easier for people to willingly believe that I fucked my cousin, just, like, as a recreational sport?"

Her eyebrow ticks up, but she doesn't say anything.

He feels a lot like that little kid on his first day of school, snarling and ready to bite because he'd been told to never let Erica out of his sight and now they were telling him to do exactly that. You can uproot Mark Zuckerberg out of that life, but you can't uproot Erica Albright out of Mark Zuckerberg.

This is who Mark is. He only cusses when he's really pissed because he's an older brother and you never grow out of that, and he's impolite to everyone he meets, because the people that matter are the ones that won't be bothered by it.

"Let me tell you something, miss," he says. "Yes, fine, I'm that kid. I took my cousin to prom. I dated her in college, because funnily enough, when you don't tell people you're each other's cousins, they don't seem to care that you sleep together. But I didn't date her because she was my cousin, it's not a reason and it wasn't a big enough deterrent, it was just a fact."

He breathes hard through his nose, and pinches the bridge of it.

"I dated her," he says softly. "Because she was the only person in the world I wanted by my side," the same way he glared down the Winklevosses and said, I went to Eduardo for the money because he was my best friend. "And if I managed to do this without her," he gestures, as if he could encompass all of Facebook, all of California, all of the billions of dollars the two of them are worth, in a single motion of his hand. "Then imagine what the fuck I could have done with her."

Marilyn shifts her weight. Her mouth is a thin line, her expression neutral and unreadable, but her eyes are soft.

"Imagine what we could have done, if only the world didn't have such delicate sensibilities about what other people should and shouldn't do with their lives. So no, Ms. Delpy, I guess you're right. I don't have the patience to take this to court and deal with a jury's sanctimonious idea of how I should behave."

"They'll use it against you," Marilyn tells him, calm, like they're talking about something stupid, like FaceMash or Eduardo's PR disaster with the chicken, and not the biggest love of Mark's whole goddamn life. "You know they will."

He huffs, humorless, and when he says, "we weren't hurting anyone," his voice comes out terribly small. "We weren't."

And we gave it up so that I could have this, he doesn't need to add.

Marilyn just nods, and says, "We'll bring the settlement papers tomorrow, in case you decide that's what you want to do," before she turns. Mark listens to her heels click all the way to the end of the hall, the loud chime of the summoned elevator.

Slowly, he spins his chair back around, glancing at the site-trafficking window he has maximized on his laptop screen -- logs from the editing staff, IP addresses pinging in a colossal stream of data. There's another window open with an e-mail from his coordinator in Bosnia, and a third, with Erica's Facebook page. He flips over to that one.

A while ago, he got a notification that Erica Albright wanted to be listed as family. He'd ignored that, and a week later, got a friend request instead.

In her profile picture, she's half-turned to talk to somebody else, fingers curled loosely around a wine glass and her mouth already parted, twisted in a wry expression like what she knows she's going to say will be clever. It's not the best shot, since the flash has washed all the color out of her face, but she looks nice, her dress champagne-colored and her hair pinned out of her eyes.

He thinks about sending her a message. Remember that time I bit Mrs. Yates and you hid me in the bathroom?

Or. Do you remember when we used to hang Jolly Ranchers off your landing, like we were fishing for sweet people?

Or. Do you remember, right after we moved into the Kirkland suite, you came out of my room wearing nothing but my shirt and boxers, and I came out with nothing but your bra and underwear, and Dustin completely failed at forming coherent sentences?

He sinks down in his chair, folding his arms so that his fingers get pinned to his ribs, like small and flightless birds.

She's single.

-

fin